Pulse Points

Sunday, February 19, 2017

The second comic I found in my closet is a series of Twilight quotes on top of famous works of art. If I had named it way back then, the name is lost into the ether. But henceforth, it shall be known as Great Works.

My senior year of college I took a comic book class. As a final project our teacher had us make comics, and I remember being absolutely terrified because I didn't know how to draw.

So I did what I always do when I have a comic book question: I frantically message Boggy. They calmed me down and told me to just look at pictures online and I'd be fine. So I spent a week non-stop trying to figure out how to make comics, and I turned it in and never thought about it again.

Until just now, when I was cleaning out my closet and I found them hidden in a folder.

Thursday, December 29, 2016

The hardest part
of writing might just be choosing what story to tell. As a writer, I want to
choose stories that not only are personally appealing to me, but also are most
effectively told in writing. If a story relies too heavily on visuals then
maybe it would be better as a graphic novel. If it relies on sounds, then maybe
it should be a podcast. If it relies on beautiful-yet-relatable actors
breathing life into my characters, then maybe it should be a screenplay. And
yet, oftentimes writers choose to tell a story in prose simply because that’s
the only medium they have to tell it.

There
has been an outbreak recently of straight-to-film books. These are books that
are written in such a visual, dialog-heavy, action-packed style that the book
reads more like a screenplay than a novel. It almost feels as though the author
wrote the book specifically so it would work on the silver screen. (Think, the
third Hunger Games)

In
my last essay I talked about imagery in horror stories, and how writers use
juxtaposition between reality and unreality to evoke a feeling of unease,
whereas films often rely on what I refer to as “startle scares”. For example, a
startle scare would be when someone is in the bathroom, and they yank the
curtain open to reveal a dead body in the bathtub. Another, quieter example would
be walking into a room and noticing that all the pictures have been flipped
around. These are things that when depicted in the context of a movie are far
more frightening than when I simply write a description out in prose.

That
isn’t to say the startle scare is impossible
to write in prose. An effective prosaic startle scare employs the effective use
of three things: emphasis, tension, and metaphor.

The Nest, by Kenneth Oppel, is a Coraline-esque
book about a hive of wasps that are trying to replace a boy name Steve’s sick
baby brother with a healthy imposter. One of the most effective points of fear
in the story is the way that Oppel employs startle scares in his text. They are not prevalent, but each one is chosen carefully so as to be maximally effective.

The first time
Oppel uses a startle scare is when the reader is introduced to the knife guy.

It wasn’t until the end, when [the knife guy] was
putting the blades back into the mower, that I noticed his hands. They were
very large with big knuckles, but he had only four fingers on each hand, and
they were weirdly shaped, and splayed so that they looked more like pincers.

The
first thing to note about this passage is that it isn’t actually that scary.
This happens in chapter three, so a small startle scare is all that is
necessary. But if this were to play out in a movie, it would take place on a quiet
street, centered around a normal-looking guy whose hands don’t appear in any
shots. The director might even choose to show an interaction that typically involves hands (an exchange of money, a handshake) but without ever allowing the audience to see the knife guy's hands. This would create a buildup of tension. And then when the camera does depict
them, the shot would emphasize them visually by centering on them, and
emphasize them aurally by accompanying the shot with a violin screech. This
build up and emphasis is paralleled in Oppel’s prose. The passage comes two
pages into the interaction with the knife guy.

Then the prose
flashes to the hands.

The
second thing to note about this passage is the way the surprise is set up. Specifically,
the first sentence. It starts out with “It wasn’t until the end…” Immediately
the readers are told that something is about to happen, but they have to wait
until the end to find out what it is. Then, Oppel throws in another clause:
“…when [the knife guy] was putting the blades back in the mower…” By delaying
the end of the sentence Oppel is building tension even further. And finally,
the sentence ends with “… that I noticed his hands.” Note that the emphasis of
this sentence is on the word “hands.” Think of how different this passage would
be if the sentence had been rearranged to read “I noticed his hands as he was
putting the blades back in the mower.” Now the emphasis is on the word “mower”
and there’s a chance the reader wouldn’t even recognize that the hands are
supposed to be the focus of the sentence.

Finally, the
paragraph ends with three details about the hands: they are large, they have
only four fingers, and they’re splayed like pincers. Each of these details
builds on the last, making the hands weirder and weirder until the very last
word. Big hands are not that weird, four fingers is not the standard, but it’s
not exactly something that would scare anyone in the real world. What’s really
frightening is that they’re splayed out like pincers. Oppel is using a reality-meets-horror simile to let the
reader know that these hands are not right. It would have been far less
effective to say they were splayed like scissors or like the letter K. Pincers
are animalistic and aggressive, so that’s the mood we are left with.

Now let’s look at
another example of a startle scare from Oppel’s text. This one takes place in
chapter 12, during the final climax of the book. Steve is being chased around
his house by a nest of wasps when he tries to open up the attic’s hatch:

To get a good grip I had to push the hatch up even
more—and the harsh light from the bare bulb blared right up into the crawl
space. A flash of dark rafters, and bits of paper and foam insulation coating
the floor, and off to the right something so out of place, it took me a second
to understand what I was looking at.

It was like a mountain of gray animal excrement. It
rose from the timbered floor into a series of sloppy peaks that fused to the
rafters. All across the papery dead surface of this vast nest were pale wasps.
Thousands of them, motionless, not making a sound.

This
passage has many parallels to the first one. Once again, the reader is given a
sentence or two of setup: “A flash of dark rafters, and bits of paper and foam
insulation coating the floor, and off to the right something so out of place,
it took me a second to understand what I was looking at.” Notice that Oppel
again uses three things of increasing intensity to build the suspense around
what it is exactly that Steve is looking at. A flash of dark rafters is sort of
creepy, but not that creepy. Bits of paper and foam insulation is a strong
detail that puts the reader further from ease simply because they are
indicative of attics which are notoriously creepy places. But the true emphasis
of the sentence is on the thing that was so out of place that Steve didn’t even
realize what he was looking at.

This
time, there’s a paragraph break between the setup and the resolution, which
puts even more emphasis on the enormity of what Steve is about to see. And when
Oppel does get a description of it, he doesn’t even say what it is at first.
The reader just knows that “it was like a mountain of gray animal excrement.”
Once again, a real thing is juxtaposed with something gross and disturbing, and
once again Oppel doesn’t even say what “it” is. The reader has to wait another
full sentence before we learn that “it” is a wasp’s nest, finally relieving the
tension that has been building for over a paragraph.

Both
of these startle scares are expertly crafted in that they rely on tension, not
the visual element in and of itself, to create a scare. And ultimately, when
the visual is described, Oppel uses metaphors and similes to describe how the
visual feels and not a literal
description of what it looks like. However, not all writers are as skilled at
this as Oppel.

Slasher Girls and Monster Boys contains
a story by Carrie Ryan called In The
Forest Dark And Deep. It centers around a girl named Cassidy, as well as
Alice in Wonderland’s March Hare as a serial killing monster. This is a story
that reads like a screenplay. It relies heavily on visuals and startle scares,
scene cuts and gore without setting a tone or creating tension.

There
are several examples of startle scares, all within the first handful of pages.
First Cassidy walks into a clearing to find a series of stumps which she
arranges in a circle. The next day in the clearing appears a table. And
finally, she sees that same table set as if for a tea party.

On further exploration, Cassidy found three
unexpected objects at the far end of the table. The first was an old top hat
that had seen better days. Its brim was ragged, its top lopsided, and it
sported a dent on one side.

Next to it sat a pillow with a pinecone on it. Two sprigs
of long brown pine needles arched from each side of the narrow end, and two red
berries perched above them. Trailing from the thicker end was a length of brown
rope.

And third was a white apron, neatly folded. A wide
blue ruffle traced the edges of it. Cassidy couldn’t help but smile and laugh.
“The Mad Hatter,” she said, tapping the top of the hat. “The Dormouse.” She
carefully petted its bristly back. “And Alice!” She slipped the apron over her
head, admiring the way it fell, just the way Alice’s had in her favorite
cartoon.

Reading this
passage, a reader can imagine how it would be set up in a movie. A girl walks
into a clearing and viewers are surprised by the image of three eerie-looking
objects. They would look dirty but intentional, and a loud drumbeat would alert
the audience to the fact that these images were important and they should be
frightened of them. But reading this passage here does not give that
impression.

First, Ryan sets
up the passage by saying that Cassidy finds three unexpected objects at the far
end of the table. This is intended to build suspense, just like in the first
Oppel example, but note the difference between the ways Ryan and Oppel place
the emphasis of their first sentence. The last word of Ryan’s sentence is
“table” not “objects.” If Ryan had applied Oppel’s formula from the first
example to this passage, the sentence could be rewritten as “On further
exploration, at the far end of the table, Cassidy found three unexpected
objects.” While I’m still not in love with this sentence, it is an improvement.
The emphasis of the sentence is the unexpected objects, not the table, and the
internal clause delays the resolution, thus building tension.

What follows is a
detailed example of the unexpected objects: a hat, a pinecone dormouse, and
Alice’s apron. But the way the passage is framed makes it hard to ascribe these
characters to the objects. First we see a detailed description of a hat, but
what the reader walks away with is an image of a dent, since that is the last
phrase of the paragraph. Second, Ryan describes a very visual setup of a
pinecone, a rope, pine needles, and some berries. I definitely did not walk
away from this paragraph thinking “Oh! It’s set up like a mouse!” I walked away
thinking “It’s a pillow covered in junk.” And finally the reader sees an apron,
but walks away thinking about blue lace, since, once again, that is the
emphasis of that sentence.

It’s only in the
final paragraph that the reader realizes they were supposed to be ascribing
Alice in Wonderland characters to each of the objects. And even after being
told what the Dormouse is supposed to be, it’s still hard to visualize. Now,
what if the above passage had been rearranged to look like this:

On further exploration, at the far end of the table,
Cassidy found three unexpected objects. The first, with a ragged brim and a
dent on one side, was an old top hat. Cassidy tapped it with her forefinger and
whispered “The Mad Hatter.”

Next to it sat a pillow supporting what looked at
first like a pile of old junk. Pinecones and berries, a length of rope and two
long sprigs of pine needles. But upon further inspection it became clear that
it had been arranged to look like a mouse. “The Dormouse,” Cassidy said,
stroking the creature’s back.

And finally, neatly folded at the end of the table, was
a white apron. Cassidy tied it around her waist, tracing her finger along the
blue lace trimming. “And that would make me Alice.”

Now, the emphasis
of each passage is the object itself, and it is clear immediately what each
object is supposed to represent. This rearrangement removes confusion, builds
tension, and the slight twist on Cassidy’s line at the end of the third
paragraph makes the passage feel resolved.

Another thing to
note is that in none of Ryan’s startling visuals does she employ the use of
metaphor. Every description is literal, almost to the point of didacticism. The
reader is told exactly how the dormouse is laid out on the pillow, exactly how
the dead bodies look when they are arrayed at the tea party, and exactly what
the March Hare looks like as he’s slaughtering his victims. It almost feels as
though Ryan was watching the story on a movie screen in her head and
transcribed it to the page.

When writing a
horror story, it’s important to choose a story that relies on more than just
specific visuals. While visuals may work in a movie setting, they fall flat on
the written page. But even the most prose-friendly horror story will often
require a visual description, or at the very least a pairing of tension and
resolution. The most successful startle scares place the most important words
at the end of sentences in order to build emphasis. They make the reader
curious about what the visual is going to be by setting it up with a sentence
that hints at an unnamed “it”. And finally, when the time comes for the visual
description, successful authors use metaphor and juxtaposition to create imagery instead of images. But when it comes down to it, startle scares are to be used
sparingly. They can be a powerful tool, but the beauty of prose is its ability
to be liquid. It’s different things to different people, and ultimately, something
intangible and unseen is scarier than something concrete.

Sunday, November 1, 2015

Now, picture this.
You’re in a dark room, covered in spindly cobwebs. There’s a dark stain on the
left side of the floor. There’s a steady drip,
drip, drip of leaky pipes, and suddenly, you hear a woman scream.

Did I scare you
now?

I would imagine
this attempt was better than my first, but once again, I’m going to go out on a
limb and say that my description of a spooky dungeon probably will not give you
nightmares tonight.

Okay, let me try
one more time:

Now did I scare you?

Finally!

Okay, okay, this
was a cheap shot. And we can quibble about the definition of “scare.” I mean,
this startled you. Maybe it made your
heart speed up, or your breath catch in your lungs. Maybe you even let out a
little scream at the very end. Or maybe you’re not someone who flinches easily,
and you’re reading this paragraph wondering when I’m going to make my point.

Movies can rely on
things like startle-scares, eerie lighting, and ghostly music to create horror,
but these techniques simply don’t work in books. I can say that you’re watching
a dimly lit room, staring at a rocking chair, and suddenly the chair starts to
move all on its own, but that isn’t nearly as frightening as the video of it.
And no matter how good of a sentence-writer I am, I am never going to be able
to startle you when the ghost jumps out.

So, if I cannot
rely on startle-scares, eerie lighting, and ghostly music to frighten my
readers, how do I do it? What makes a book scary?

There
are dozens of techniques for making a story scary, and what is scary to one
person may not be scary to another. I was bored silly by Pet Sematary, but someone with arachnophobia might need a
nightlight after reading Charlotte’s Web.
I recently read Slasher Girls &
Monster Boys, which is an anthology of short stories by fourteen different
young adult writers. And while books can’t show you a haunting image of a
dungeon to scare you, books create an imagery all their own. By describing
real-world people with disturbing or even magical descriptions, the reader can
become unsettled in a way that is entirely unique to books.

In
Nova Ren Suma’s The Birds of Azalea
Street we learn the story of a group of young girls who feels threatened by
a creepy neighbor, Leonard. Leonard is a loner who likes to shoot birds and
take photographs of teenage girls, but no one seems to realize it except Tasha
and her friends. This all changes when one night a strange girl comes home with
Leonard.

There
is nothing specifically odd about this visitor (except for the fact that she is
with Leonard), but we sense something strange about her from the beginning. Even
though Suma cannot accompany the girl’s first appearance with trembling violins
and a gray lighting filter, she can
make us feel uncomfortable using her language.

First of all, the girl
is the literary equivalent of Wilson from Home Improvement in that we never see
her face. She begins as nothing more than a shadow:

That night we noted the
questionable shadow in his passenger seat. It was taller than usual. It had a
distinctly human-sized head.

(And a human-esque shadow at that.)

Then, she gets a body, but we don’t
see her face:

She wore a dark hood, and
around it was a haze of fur, like she’d just landed in our subdivision from the
North Pole and didn’t realize that, down here, it was spring.

And finally, we see her legs:

Even with all that, I could
see her legs. Her legs were in black stockings, the kind with seams. At the end
of her legs were little pointed blades that took to the pavement like ice
picks.

As time progresses we get a more
solid view of Leonard’s friend:

The fur
trim on her coat rippled in the wind like a layer of feathers.

His lady friend had dark,
deep-purple painted nails, and they were long and curling, almost like claws

She cocked her head in the
frame of the window.

In every description, the girl is
described as though she’s a bird. Her fingernails are claws, her coat is
feathers, her movements are jerky. When she arrives somewhere she “lands”, and
the words “North Pole” and “spring” evoke images of birds flying south for the
winter. And even though the girl’s legs are described only as legs, they are
long and thin and separated from her coat-body in a way that makes us feel like
they are birds’ legs, even though they are not described as such.

Finally, when the
girl gets her revenge on Leonard, we are told explicitly that the girl was a
bird all along:

…and her legs, her beautiful
legs, shrunk in and shifted. Her coat became a part of her body, or maybe it
always was. Her arms—what was left of them—opened wide. A dark streak took off
from the back steps and the sky caught it and it was a bird, it was always a
bird, she was, and the bird soared up into the clouds…

Suma pulls off
this technique of juxtaposition with incredible aplomb. She has a mastery of
language that is evident not only in the fact that she utilizes this technique,
but also in her specific word choices. For example, let’s take a look at this
quote:

She wore a dark hood, and
around it was a haze of fur, like she’d just landed in our subdivision from the
North Pole and didn’t realize that, down here, it was spring.

I am particularly
fond of this sentence, because its word choice is not particularly avian. For
example, Suma uses the word “fur” not “feathers”, and there are not many bird
species that are known for living in the North Pole. But, if we rewrite this
passage using different details, we notice something interesting:

She wore a dark hood, and
around it was a halo of fur, like she’d just arrived from Alaska and didn’t get
the memo that over here it was t-shirt season.

Even though this
sentence is nearly identical to the first one, it carries an entirely different
tone. Suma uses the word “landed”, which implies that the girl herself was the
one doing the landing, whereas when I use the word “arrived”, implying someone
coming in on an airplane. Swapping out “haze” for “halo” suddenly makes the
girl seem angelic, which clashes with Suma’s preexisting avian picture.
Changing “North Pole” for “Alaska” seems like it might be trivial, since both
are places known for being cold, but by using the word “North” right next to
the word “spring” we create an image of birds flying south for the winter. And
by referencing t-shirts, suddenly my imagery becomes almost teeny-bopper. So
even though my rewrite carries the exact same meaning as Suma’s original, I
have stripped the magic of the passage.

The Birds of Azalea Street occupies a
space between reality and magic that Nova Ren Suma has made her home. There are
no ghosts or vampires, and the only monster is a creepy neighbor. There is no
explicit magic—“bird” is another word for “woman” after all—and this story
isn’t the sort that is going to give me nightmares. And yet throughout it all
the reader has a vague feeling of discomfort. The feeling of never quite
knowing what is real and what is not, what is girl and what is bird, leaves the
reader feeling unsettled. It provides creepy imagery without attempting to rely
on movie tropes.

In Leigh Bardugo’s
Verse Chorus Verse the reader learns
the story of Jaycee, a young pop star who goes into rehab. Like Suma, Bardugo
uses metaphor and descriptive language to evoke a feeling surrounding a
character. But where The Birds of Azalea
Street uses imagery to make us wonder what is real and what is magic, Verse Chorus Verse uses imagery to make
us wonder who can truly be trusted.

In the first
section of the story, we’re introduced to Louise. We meet her through the eyes
of Kara, Jaycee’s judgmental stage mom, and we’re immediately drawn to her,
simply because we don’t like Kara and Kara doesn’t like Louise. And when we
first meet Louise in person, we want to like her. She’s the voice of reason in
Jaycee’s chaotic pop star lifestyle. Jaycee claims she doesn’t drink, Louise
calls her out on it. Jaycee says she doesn’t want to go to group therapy,
Louise makes her go. So when we start to see details of Louise’s appearance
that don’t quite line up with our perception of her, we start to get
uncomfortable:

Louise
smiled. She had yellowing teeth, smoker’s teeth.

This bit of
imagery sticks out because “yellowing teeth” is not only a disturbing image in
and of itself, but it contrasts so strongly with our existing image of Louise as
a good nurse and the rehab facility as a pure, pristine place of assistance. Then,
as we progress, the disturbing imagery grows:

Louise took a slim band of rubber from a drawer and
tied it tightly in place above her elbow. Jaycee’s hand started to throb. She
couldn’t stop looking at the thin line of grime embedded beneath each of
Louise’s nails.

This quote evokes
and even more visceral description. The reader can almost feel their arm
throbbing, and they shiver slightly as they imagine someone touching them with
dirty fingernails. And as Louise begins to take Jaycee’s blood, the reader is flooded
with grotesque details:

Up close, her teeth looked
more brown than yellow. They were thick, with dirty little ridges. Not like teeth, Jaycee thought. Like tusks.

Louise took hold of Jaycee’s
arm and Jaycee saw that the nurse had coarse, dark hairs on the backs of her
wrists.

The smell coming off of her
was sweat and the ashy vegetable stink of dumpsters in a hotel alley.

Moments ago her laugh had
seemed warm and friendly; now it had an ugly, knowing sound to it.

And finally, as the nurse starts to
probe further and further into Jaycee’s life, the disturbing descriptions reach
a climax:

The nurse’s eyes looked
bloodshot, her nostrils curiously wide and dark. Flecks of foam had formed in
the corners of her mouth. Jaycee tried to stand, but her knees buckled. Dimly
she was aware that there was a needle still in her arm. The room tipped and she
hit the white floor with a loud crack. She saw the soles of Louise’s purple
Crocs. They were caked with something black and foul.

Looking at
Bardugo’s passages, there is an overarching theme of color. In the beginning of
this passage we are in a hospital room: sterile, pristine, white. Then, slowly,
color starts leaking in. Louise’s teeth are yellow. No, not yellow, brown. The
hairs on the backs of her hands are dark, and the red blood is so dark it’s
almost black. Let’s take a look now at the climax of the passage:

The nurse’s eyes looked
bloodshot, her nostrils curiously wide and dark. Flecks of foam had formed in
the corners of her mouth. Jaycee tried to stand, but her knees buckled. Dimly
she was aware that there was a needle still in her arm. The room tipped and she
hit the white floor with a loud crack. She saw the soles of Louise’s purple
Crocs. They were caked with something black and foul.

While the earlier
passages have a splash of color here and there, this paragraph sloshes them all
together at once. We have bloodshot eyes, and dark nostrils. When Jaycee falls
she hits the white floor, and Louise’s Crocs are purple, but they’re covered
with something black. This scene, when taken as a whole, makes me think of a
Pollock painting; it’s a white background with splatters of color. But the last
paragraph makes me think of someone smearing all the colors together to cause
chaos. Now, let’s see what happens if I rewrite this passage without using
color words.

The nurse’s eyes were watery,
and her nostrils so wide that Jaycee could make out every hair. Flecks of foam
had formed in the corners of her mouth, and when Jaycee tried to stand, her
knees buckled. Dimly she was aware that there was a needle still in her arm. The
room tipped and she hit the linoleum floor with a loud crack. She saw the soles
of Louise’s Crocs. They were caked with a smelly muck.

Watery eyes can be
eerie in their own way, but bloodshot evokes images of spidery, almost
Pollock-esque veins. And even though nose hair is gross, Jaycee’s ability to see
them directly contradicts the previous images of darkness. Linoleum floor
implies cheapness, not sterility, and removing the word “purple” as a
descriptor of Louise’s Crocs removes the shock of bright color against this
black-and-white background. And even though smelly muck is unpleasant, it
doesn’t evoke darkness and grime the same way that “black and foul” does. Even
though this rewritten passage has the same sentiment as the original one,
removing the colors disrupts the feeling of a crescendo of chaos coming to
surround Jaycee. Bardugo’s precision of language in this scene is expertly done
and creates a terrifying tone that is perfect for horror.

When it comes to
scaring your readers, there is no one formula that works for everyone, and what
works in one story may very well fail in another. But we want to take advantage
of the medium we’ve chosen to tell our story. So even though a literal
description of a haunted dungeon isn’t as scary as an image of it, the opposite
can hold true as well. A picture of dirty crocs doesn’t scare us:

nor a picture of yellow teeth:

but when we use these details as
descriptors, our stories go from flat to frightening.

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Meet Philosoraptor. He’s a Denizen of the Internet, often popping up next
to Conspiracy Keanu and The Most Interesting Man In The World. Or, if you run
in certain circles (*cough, tech, cough*), he will pop up in almost every
formal presentation you watch. Like the listicle, memes can be seen as the
Internet at its worst. Formulaic and clichéd, perhaps, but memes are a valuable
way to emphasize a point, check if your audience is paying attention, or even establish
common ground between presenter and listener. A well-placed meme can say, “Look,
buddy, I’m just like you. I also spend too much time on Reddit and think GIF is
pronounced ‘jiff.’”

Writers are
constantly looking for ways of establishing common ground with their readers.
They want their characters to be “just like you” even if they are fantastically
beautiful and secretly a vampire. When someone gives a tech presentation, it is
safe to assume that their viewers know the Internet. Whether or not they are
fans of Philosoraptor, they will at least know who he is. Philosoraptor is a
part of the universe in which the talk exists.

In books, however,
the universe is not the Internet, but rather Book World. It’s a world where
everyone will catch a reference to Catcher
in the Rye just as quickly as they will grok a reference to Stranger in a Strange Land. Including an
intertextual reference creates common ground between author and reader. It
roots the story in reality and makes readers feel temporarily safe, even though
they may very soon fly away to Neverland. An intertextual reference can
emphasize a point, check if the audience is paying attention, or even establish
a connection between character and reader. It’s a way of saying “Hey, buddy,
I’m just like you. I also spent my teenage years crushing on Mr. Darcy, and I
eagerly await a letter from Hogwarts every September, even though I’m
thirty-two.”

Readers will
relate to a character who is also a reader. And the first thing they want to
know when they meet someone who reads is to find out what they read. Bella Swan reads Pride and Prejudice, Meggie Folchart reads Peter Pan, Matilda reads Great
Expectations. This tells readers something powerful about these characters.
Just think how different Bella Swan would have been if her favorite book had
been Gossip Girl. These characters
read the classics. They are smart, sophisticated, and immediately set apart
from the other kids in their class, who probably don’t read at all, and if they
did, would probably read Gossip Girl.

If you’re anything
like me, you’re relating already.

So why does Bella
read Pride and Prejudice and not Catcher in the Rye? Why does Matilda
read Great Expectations and not War and Peace? Why does Hermione tear
her way through every book on magic in the Hogwarts library, but we never see
her reading the collective works of Mark Twain?

Every word used in
a story creates a ripple. If I whisper
something, that feels different than if I mumble
it, or if I breathe it. It isn’t just
the word that comes through the page, but all the images associated with that
word. Whisper makes me think of girls
giggling behind their teacher’s back, and mumble
makes me think of giving a presentation but having stage fright. Breathe, on the other hand, makes me
think of lovers in a bed exchanging pillow talk. The ripples might not be the same for everybody, but the point is that the ripples exist. If this much imagery ripples
forth from a single verb, imagine the ripples that emanate from a whole book!

The words Pride and Prejudice, separated entirely from the work by Jane Austen, make
me think of stubbornness and exclusion, class structures, rules, and someone
with her nose in the air. And when we add to the ripples that emanate from the
book’s title to the ripples of the book itself we end up with waves. We think
of romance and tension and gossip and Victorian England. We think of long
conversations over steaming mugs of tea, and elaborate dresses worn to even
more elaborate parties. We think about gardens and grandmothers, or even Jane Austen herself. And just like that, we understand Bella’s headspace, simply because we know what she reads.

When an author
includes an intertextual reference to a well-known classic, she is creating
common ground. She is putting the character in a position that is relatable,
while simultaneously creating imagery and giving her character a back story.
But what happens when the author includes a less well-known book in her text?
What happens when the book isn’t even explicitly named, but is merely
referenced? Maybe the book is an endowed object, like A Wrinkle in Time in When You
Reach Me, or maybe it is just a textural element, like the fact that Petey’s
favorite book in Bone Gap is Blankets. Or maybe it’s just a throwaway
joke, like when Ezra thinks, “As if I were not in danger of losing interest in everything else” in
Monstrous Beauty.

Rebecca Stead references A Wrinkle
in Time in her book When You Reach Me,
but it’s never named directly. We first learn about Miranda’s favorite book on
page 8:

I knew the first line of my
book without even looking. “It was a dark and stormy night,” I said.

She nodded. “Classic. I like
that. What’s the story about?”

I thought for a second.
“It’s about a girl named Meg—her dad is missing, and she goes on this trip to
another planet to save him.”

Miranda’s favorite
book is critical to the story, not only because it plays a role in the plot,
but also because Miranda’s life mirrors Meg’s. Both protagonists are young
girls with missing fathers, and, of course, both girls are surrounded by a time
travel mystery. Miranda even draws a spiritual connection between herself and
Meg when she says, “The truth is that my book doesn’t say how old Meg is, but I
am twelve, so she feels twelve to me. When I first got the book I was eleven,
and she felt eleven.” In many ways, When
You Reach Me is a rewriting of A
Wrinkle In Time, but When You Reach
Me can also exist independently of A
Wrinkle in Time. Miranda’s favorite book may as well be a book made up in
Rebecca Stead’s head as far as the casual reader is concerned, but a close
reader will notice the connection and draw parallels between the two books that
enrich both stories.

In Laura Ruby’s Bone Gap, Petey loves the book Blankets, but, just like Miranda’s
favorite book, it isn’t referenced by name. While a cursory knowledge of A Wrinkle in Time is critical to
understanding When You Reach Me, one
could read the entirety of Bone Gap without
even realizing there are references to Blankets
at all:

Now Petey got up from her bed and grabbed a book, one of her favorites.
It was a graphic novel about two brothers, one who falls madly in love with a
girl only to have his heart horribly broken. If novels could be trusted, there
was a boy in the world who shared a bed with his brother when he was very
small, peed on his brother for fun and torment, fell so madly in love with a
girl that he could convince himself that she was crafted by a divine artist,
and that she was both perfect and unknowable. Petey was an only child, and
boys—kind ones, gentle ones—were a mystery to her. She liked imagining small
boys fighting over blankets.

If a reader wanted
to, they could read this passage and simply glean that Petey wants a boy to
fall madly in love with her. But, a close reader could draw a parallel between
the way that Craig sees Raina through his drawings and the way that Finn sees
Petey through his face blindness.

In both When You Reach Me and Bone Gap, the intertextual reference
exists as a way to deepen the story for close readers. But sometimes, an
intertextual reference is simply a way for the author to express her humanity from behind the veil of text. Even though the book exists in its own universe, the author exists in the same universe as the reader. If the author can connect to the reader, not just in the book-world and but the real-world as well, then the reading experience can become far more interactive. In some cases the reference can be a PR tactic, like the fact that George R. R. Martin is naming a future character Dave Goldblatt because someone
won that “reward” in an auction. Other times it can be to honor a fan, like when J.K. Rowling named a character Natalie in Goblet of Fire after a young leukemia
patient wrote to Rowling to find out how Harry
Potter ended before she died. Other times it reads almost like a joke, or a wink at true-blue fans, like when Roald Dahl briefly refers to “vermicious
knids,” the evil alien race that resembles a turd from Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator in James and the Giant Peach.

When I asked
Laura Ruby why she referenced Blankets in
Bone Gap, she wrote me a very
thoughtful response about the parallels between Petey and Raina, and how Blankets helps Petey imagine herself
worthy of love. And this is true. The Blankets
reference highlights some thematic elements of Bone Gap that I might not have noticed otherwise. But, the very
first thing Laura said to me in her response was, “I think Blankets is amazing and I put it in my story because I could. :)”

CEOs of Fortune
500 technology companies use memes in their internationally-broadcasted
presentations to say, “Look, buddy, I’m just like you. I put on my shoes one
foot at a time and lol at lolcats with the best of them.” But ultimately, they
use memes because they think they are funny. They love Philosoraptor and
Conspiracy Keanu and The Most Interesting Man In The World just as much as
writers love making their character mumble “So it goes” under his breath when
his grandma dies, or making him “screw his courage to the sticking place” when
he’s nervous.

We write because
we love it. We write because it’s how we connect with the world and how we
express ourselves. It’s how we tell the people we love that we love them, and
the people who hurt us where they can stuff it. And when we make references to
our favorite books it’s because we love our favorite books, and we love people
who love them too. It’s our way of thanking all the people that we couldn’t fit
into our acknowledgments section, and winking at the people who we know will
appreciate it.

And that’s all
there is; there isn’t any more :).

Works
Cited

(Note:
I reference a whole bunch of books in my essay, and I included most of them
here, but I got bored and stopped because there are like 20 and most of them
are mentioned just once by title and never again. Also one of the most
important sources for this paper was when Laura Ruby responded to an email I
sent her asking why she chose to reference Blankets
in her book Bone Gap. I didn’t know
how to reference that either, so I’m including this parenthetical)

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

She is four years
old, and her mother abandoned her at a pagoda temple in her home of Cambodia
when she could no longer afford to feed her. Now, Leakhena earns enough money
to eat by sorting through garbage at the dump to find recyclables. Her biggest
dream is to some day be able to go to school.

Unless
you’re a heartless cretin, you care about Leakhena. You’ve seen her face,
you’ve heard her story, you’re rooting for her. You might even donate money to
save her.

Now
what if I told you that 3.5 million children die from starvation every year?

One
would think the second statement would elicit more empathy, and thus more donations,
than Leakhena’s story. If someone would donate $5 to save one child, why
wouldn’t they donate at least that much to save 3.5 million? But, as it turns
out, people are twice as likely to donate money to Leakhena as they are to
donate money to “children dying from starvation.”

Experts
might say that this is the result of something called The Identifiable Victim Effect. People care more about the one child
they know than about the 3,499,999 children they don’t. Writers, however, will say
that Leakhena is a round character, and the other 3,499,999 children are flat.

Maybe a writer
isn’t trying to elicit monetary donations from her readers, but she is, in a
sense, trying to elicit temporal donations.
A writer wants her readers to invest time in the story. This can only be
accomplished by creating a Leakhena, or a round character.

Everyone connects
more strongly and more quickly to an image than they do to text describing that
image but for young readers, this disparity is quite large.

Lucido’s
Conjecture -- The importance of
illustration in the creation of a round character is inversely proportional to
the age of the intended audience.

Young
children do not possess a mature ability to synthesize words into pictures in
their head, so in order for children to connect to a story, they need a
concrete image for even the most basic of craft elements, like character and
plot. And in a format that emphasizes economy of language, picture books simply
do not have the space to create the emotional connection out of words that can be
done instantaneously with a picture.

This is Lilly.

This image conveys
a lot of information about Lilly. There’s the obvious, like Lilly is a mouse
girl, but the information is even deeper than that. Lilly is happy, as
evidenced by her smile and her skip; she likes to play dress-up, as evidenced
by the crown and the boots and the cape; and something magical is going on in
her head, as evidenced by the stars. There is more information in this image
that could possibly be conveyed in a single page of text in a picture book. But
this picture of Lilly is more than just a way to convey information. It gives
children that instant connection they need in order to be invested enough to turn the page.

Every
page of Lilly’s book is illustrated to define what is happening in that part of
the story. Young children need the images not only to connect to the
characters, but also to understand the story’s plot. For example, we are not just told that "[Lily] loved the pointy pencils. She loved the squeaky chalk. And she loved the way her boots went clickety-clickety-clack down the long, shiny hallways." we are shown an illustration for nearly every word in this sentence:

As
kids grow up, their books start to have fewer pictures. Kids no longer need
explicit images to be able to visualize a character, and authors have more
words to work with in chapter books than in picture books. Once children start
to read books like Ramona, a combination of explanatory words and sporadic pictures
suffices.

This is Ramona.

Just like in the
picture of Lilly, this picture of Ramona conveys a ton of information. We can
see that Ramona is pretending to be a bunny, which means that she has a lot of
imagination. She’s active, because she’s jumping, and she’s crafty, because her
ears look hand-made. Her hair is a little messed up, she’s wearing overalls
instead of a dress, and her straps seem a little cockeyed. From this we can
figure out that, unlike Lilly, Ramona is not the sort of girl who worries about
how she looks.

In a book about
Ramona we have many more words to describe her than we do in a book about Lilly,
so the primary focus of this image isn’t to convey information, it’s to convey expression. Nearly every picture in
every Ramona book captures the characters at the height of emotion:

The
readers of Ramona are old enough to visualize the characters and events of the
story, but in order to feel the emotion that Ramona is feeling, it helps them
to have physical images on the page.

Finally, let’s
take a look at a book like Harry Potter,
which provides small illustrations at the beginning of chapters.

This
is Harry.

By the time children
mature to the point where they can read a story about Harry, they are capable
of creating images in their heads with words. They no longer need to know
exactly what Harry looks like at all times in order to care about him, because
they can imagine Harry in the way that the reader of a book about Lilly or
Ramona cannot, simply because they are older and have a greater ability to synthesize words into pictures. So the images at the tops of the chapters no longer convey
critical story or character information, but rather a mood. The image above doesn't tell us anything about what happens in this chapter of Harry Potter (in fact, I don't even know off the top of my head which book it comes from) but the long shadow gives us a sense of foreboding. Harry's expression looks nervous, and the angle gives us a sense of a little Harry in a large room.

One does wonder if
Harry Potter would have been quite so
successful if these little images hadn’t begun each chapter. If we are two
times as likely to donate money to help a starving child if we see a picture of
her, does that mean we care two times as much about her? Perhaps we would only
have cared half as much about Harry Potter as we do if we had never been shown
Harry’s picture. Of course, Rowling does an incredible job of describing Harry
in such a way that we have a mental picture of him even without the drawings:

"Perhaps it had something to do with living in a dark cupboard, but Harry had always been small and skinny for his age. He looked even smaller and skinnier than he really was because all he had to wear were old clothes of Dudley's, and Dudley was about four times bigger than he was. Harry had a thin face, knobbly knees, black hair, and bright green eyes. He wore glasses held together with a lot of Scotch tape because of all the times Dudley had punched him on the nose. the only thing Harry liked about his own appearance was a very thin scar on his forehead that was shaped like a bolt of lightening."

Not only does this give us a vivid picture of Harry's appearance, but it also tells us about him as a person. He gets beaten up by his cousin. He wears hand-me-downs. And he has a strange scar on his forehead that he likes. As wonderful as this description is, and as wonderful as the rest of the book is, it is a useful exercise to consider how the drawings that so perfectly capture the mood of the chapters might have
contributed to the success of the series.

They
say a picture is worth a thousand words, but that’s a load of crap; there’s no
exchange rate between text and illustration. For young readers illustrations are priceless, as the story wouldn't carry weight for them without it. As the intended audience ages there is a sort of illustration devaluation. A picture becomes less and less valuable, and when a book is written for an adult, images aren't needed at all to forge a connection between reader and character.